Inside what you so gibly respoinded to is my view:
So back to my point:
The relevance of gold in terms of responding to (or even just understanding) global debt - or even just the US debt pile - is extremely limited.
Even if I was off by a factor of 10 - that's 15 years of *global* gold *production* - just to pay the US debt back. And assuming the persons/organisations to whom the debt is owed (a dubious idea in the first place) actually want all that physical stuff that they then have to store securely ...
You suggest that no one knows how much gold there is out there?
Are you serious?
Yeah, like geologists haven't been studying that for years. And if there was a lot more gold "out there" (in terms of what we could reap from the earth) then gold would be worth less anyway.
Gold mining is a big, loud, energy intensive and dangerous job. We know eactly how much gold we extract year by year.

current us national debt (USD): 24.95 trillion.
1 US ton of gold curreently priced at about 55 million USD.
That's approximately 454600 tons of gold.
For perspective ont his: Global extraction of gold is about 3200 tons every year.
In other words to cover (just) the US national debt with gold you would have to spend 142 years extracting gold from the earth and using it for nothing other than paying down the debt. Which would be physically possible assuming 0% inflation for 1 and a half centuries. And assuming you didn't ever need gold for anything else.
Or, to put it another way, that's an awful lot of oligarch's boats to hide all this stuff in.
If each oligarch had 10 tons hidden in their boats - how many boats would you need to hide a "significant" amount of gold?
Oh yeah, and boats sink.
From this visualization ... a very rough calculation of the world's gold reserves (admitedly the publicly declared stocks) is about 25 000 tons ... or slightly more than 1/20th of the gold required to pay back the debt ...:
For your point to be relevant on a global economic stage you would need significantly more than this amount in "hidden" spaces ...

Good challenges. What Locke doesn't get is even if government is upheld by violoence (or the threat of violence) it is, at least, not as violent as the complete absence of government.
Locke's view of a government-less world as a better world hasn;t been properly tested.
But what has been tested is what the world would be like without government. Home schooling. 'Nuff said.

And it seems to me sensible to worry about currency risk when sloshing money around at unprecedented speed.
But when the other currencies are sloshing money around as fast (or faster) then local currency risk is lower, surely?
If all the children on the playground are stealing each other's lunch, the probability of getting caught stealing your classmates lunch is much smaller. As long as you aren't the one caught and punished when the fashion for stealing lunches ends ... like the last person into a Ponzi scheme pays all the price.

House prices are closely tied to affordability which is a mix of steady income and the cost of debt.
The cost of debt is near zero - even cost of saving (negative interest rates) rears its head.
I suspect much of this is about how unemployment jumps (or not).

Bruce,
Yeah, Belgium - being a part of the EU were - amazingly and miraculously rescued by their membership of a large conglomerate of autocratic and unrepresentative groups (the EU). This is fact, yes. Definitely. Ah no, wait - let's look at the evidence:
Using basic metrics like this is hardly the whole picture ... but Belgium are significantly worse off - more so than could be explained by demographic or sociological differences.
Stop trying to conflate a global event with a regional one issue ... it is, at best, a very weak argument ... and truth is it make people who obsess about ignoring democracy (like those who re determined to bang the drum for remaining in the EU) look like they are quite short on the logic skills.
And when you have the wherewithall to understand the difference between nominal figures and proportions you find that the UK is not - as the mainstream media tout - significantly worse of than the Spanish or Italian experiences - and certianly not more so than the Belgian one.
For 1 thing: Italian hospitals (in specific locales) ran out of capacity, the UK ones did not. And there are a lot of other ways in which this has played out differently for different countries whether they are in the EU or not.

Yes, because COVID19 isn't affecting the rest of the world? Ah no ... wait .. maybe it is ...
If you want mismanagement examples there are *plenty* of those from around the world ... and you don't have to ingest bleach to see them.

If the details of how the landlord threw the lodger out are true then a crime was commited (as identified in the BBC article).
In terms for 4k pre-paid rent ... not sure that is illegal since (in theory at least) the applicant can just move on to the next option ... ?

Good points, though I wonder to what extent - if at all ???? - this is about TPTB realising that they are on a debt rollercoaster and the only way forward is to increase the speed of the rollercoaster?
Although, for the first time I think this time (the virus is real, the extent to which the lockdowns are an appropriately proportioinal response is a matter of some debate I think) ... this time the "excuse" is a real externality to their feifdoms.
I wonder how many of the "financial gurus" really just love pressing the "print more money" button and just love this excuse.

Not everyone's definition of "bland" is the same as everyone else's.
What would you buy for 20k that would par with a a 2018 Leaf?
Bearing in mind that over 3 years you would be looking a a TCO difference of about 10k assuming you do the "normal" 10k miles?

Recruitment agent. Estate agent. {pick anything} agent.
For most of them it's easy to tell when they are lying. Lips. Moving.
Except maybe travel agent - but even then their business model is based on bulk buy and slice, or kickbacks. But that industry isn't doing that well anymore anyway ...

10million is a significant percentage of the US workforce (at about 157 million). 10 million here in Brittain would be an altogether different thing of course.
The scale of the bail outs that have already been issues is enormous. At least this time some of the bailout is going to directly to US firms (esp. smaller one) ... or it would do if the loan providers could do the paperwork fast enough ... (hint: one of the packages in the US is referred to as PPP (if you fancy applying - it's here)).